dfw

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1997 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

I’m usually unsentimental about such things, but this is terrible, and is upsetting me a bit. Who knows about Infinite Jest, fuck it really, but the stuff in Brief Interviews and especially Oblivion is excellent, as good as anything out there, writer’s writing, and all the rest.

Who can know what was going on, but it’s not a superfun lifepath, this one, no matter whether it seems to be turning out well, badly, or – as it always does or seems to do – somewhere in between, tending toward badly.

In Infinte Jest (which is worth the read), a cocaine addicted, clinically depressed grad student hosts a radio show under the pseudonym Madame Psychosis which offers solace to lots of troubled listeners in the Boston area. She attempts suicide, survives. One character, who is attracted to her show because in it she so nakedly reveals how sad she is, remarks that he thinks she would be less sad if she could only somehow hear her own show. It makes me think that I wish David Foster Wallace could have read his own books, and been fortified to face whatever it was he didn’t want to face–the way that many of us have.